People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  As they spread out from Great Bear, two new influences would have begun to make themselves felt. The caribou made their annual migrations north each spring to the Arctic Coast, and over a period of years beginning perhaps two millenniums ago, some of the inland dwellers must have reached the coast in seasonal pursuit of the migrating deer. These people could have acquired a knowledge of the sea, and perhaps developed a mixed sea-and-caribou culture such as persists to this day with the Bathurst Inlet Eskimos. Caribou provide the staff of life in summer for these people, but in winter they depend on the sea for seals and other aquatic mammals.

  The second factor to disturb life about Great Bear Lake may have been of a more recent nature. It is known that, many centuries ago, centers of human population pressure developed on the prairies lying south of the Canadian forests. This pressure was exerted northward, in succeeding waves. In relatively recent times the proto-Cree Indians were pushed out of the plains and forced high up into the forests, where they in turn pressed against the south flanks of the Athapascan Indians, of which the Chipewyans are one group.

  The Athapascan people were unable to stand firm against the pressure of the Crees, for they were poorly organized, or not organized at all. They could not fight except through the medium of quick raids and ambushes, and so they moved north to escape. They moved right out into the Barrens at last, and in time they suited their way of life to the deer and became almost as migratory as the deer herds themselves.

  It was inevitable that they should encroach on the lands of the inland Eskimos near Great Slave Lake, and it was inevitable that blood would be shed. Samuel Hearne, writing of his search for the Coppermine River in the year 1771, tells of the massacre of an Eskimo band by Athapascans at a place now called Bloody Falls. This is a famous tale, but it was only one isolated incident in a war of attrition and of survival which must then have been very old, and which was to continue almost to the end of the nineteenth century.

  As the Athapascans were unable to stand against the inroads of the Crees, so the unwarlike inland Eskimos were even less able to withstand the recurrent Indian invasions. Eventually the men of the plains were forced eastward away from the Great Freshwater Sea.

  There are Ihalmiut folk memories of the trek in search of new lands where the Itkilit had not yet penetrated. Some of the fugitives, probably those who had already been to the sea in pursuit of caribou herds, seem to have fled northeastward, and it is probable that these people came to the Arctic Coast from Coronation Gulf to Chantrey Inlet. These northern fugitives also developed a new culture adapted to the demands of the sea. But the rest of the plains dwellers went east into the widening angle of the Barrens, and remained an inland people.

  The sea culture came to have a complex structure, built up of many layers of change, migration and the intermixing of local groups. The original offshoots of the proto-Eskimo stock, who had learned to live from the sea, spread eastward as far as Greenland, and westward again back into Siberia. But the men who had steadfastly remained with the plains since their arrival on the continent stayed in the plains. Stubbornly they clung to the old things as they fled eastward where the depths of the Barrens are greatest. The inlanders eventually reached the spreading plains of the Keewatin Territory on the west coast of Hudson Bay, a north-south stretch of tundra vast enough so that it was at last possible to avoid the thrusts of the Indians. And in this new land, good fortune came to the fugitive descendants of the first Eskimo stock.

  When white men came to the prairies and the forests of Northern Canada in force, the pressure of the Indians into the Barrens ended. With the decimation by disease (mainly smallpox) of the Idthen Eldeli about 1780, the Eskimos were able to push southward, up the River of Men, until they established their southernmost camps on the very edge of the forests. Now the entire length of Innuit Ku was theirs, and more and more camps came into being.

  No one will ever know with certainty how many Innuit lived in the interior tundra plains in the good years of the early nineteenth century. There must have been more than a thousand, and perhaps twice that many in 1880, before a new evil came upon them from the South and accomplished that destruction which two millenniums had been unable to achieve.

  I well remember the whitened fragments of the crossbow I found in the Angkuni hills. But at the time of its finding, the crossbow meant little to me, for it was then only another sad relic to handle and wonder about, and to put aside. We had little interest in meditating on such ancient history then, for we were becoming increasingly worried about our own immediate future. The deer still had not come and we could no longer wait for their life-giving flow into the barren hills of Angkuni. It was time we took active steps to find other food.

  We tried fishing, but though we set our nets in picked places along the lakeshore, we caught nothing. And this was not only strange, but a little frightening, for all the other great lakes of the Barrens swarm with whitefish, lake trout and pike. Only Angkuni inexplicably refused to give us fish.

  There remained the birds, but despite many heartbreaking hunts after ptarmigan we managed to kill only three or four in a week. Truly, the land about Angkuni was dead in every sense of the word. There was nothing alive that could be eaten; there were only eaters—the flies and ourselves.

  It was then almost August, and at last we decided we would wait no longer but would set out in search of the laggard deer. Very early in the morning of a bright day when no puff of wind ruffled the stiff crests of the gray-green lichens on the hill slopes, we packed our gear into the canoe and set out to find Tuktu. And we were all glad to go, for the atmosphere of Angkuni, which had become increasingly oppressive to Andy and me, had an even more deep-seated and ominous effect on Ohoto.

  We paddled westward from Kinetua Bay until our way was blocked by what seemed to be a great isthmus. After a search we came to a passage, very shallow, but with enough water to allow us to drag the canoe over the barrier and into open water beyond. At this point Tyrrell’s map became useless. We could no longer identify his landmarks or his route, perhaps because we had passed through the isthmus by a different channel. Now we were off the narrow lane of known territory which Tyrrell had explored. Instead we swung to the west into another vast bay of Angkuni which Tyrrell had missed.

  The sky was flawless and the sun fiercely hot. The cold waters of the lake grew misty under the pounding heat. The lowlands under the hills became an undulating phantasmagoria, as mirages flickered endlessly before us.

  There was an absolute and tangible silence, broken only by the fluid dip of paddles and the gentle mutter of water underneath the bow of the canoe. The lake itself was frozen in the dead, unearthly grip of perfect calm.

  Islands rose suddenly before us, like surfacing sea monsters soundlessly appearing. They lifted clear of the horizon, then floated faintly in the sky as their mirage images dissolved. The shore drew away from us and twisted so that its low, uncertain progress gave us no clear conception of whether it was one mile or ten miles away. Angkuni lost all semblance of reality and of concrete form. Its shores and islands had an amorphous quality which defied the eye and left the mind with no clear memory of what had passed astern of the canoe.

  The hypnotic atmosphere seemed to transform all our efforts into a nebulous and ever-changing dream. Then suddenly Ohoto pointed into the waters beneath us.

  “Kuwee!” he cried. “Here flows a little river!”

  With some sense unknown to us, he had detected the invisible presence of a slight current in the bay. At his direction, we turned the canoe toward the shimmering and elusive shore. We closed in on the land and it resolved itself into a contorted jumble of smashed rocks. We let the canoe drift. Then, when we were so close we could have touched the boulders with a paddle, we heard the stream for which we were seeking.

  It was hardly a river, this secret water flashing momentarily against the lake before losing itself in the still depths. Y
et Kuwee, as Ohoto named it, seemed a friendly and delightful being. It ran from the northwest, out of the heartland of the Barrens where no white man had ever traveled, and it ran out of the direction from which the deer should come. Because of these things and because we hoped for fish under its rapids, we began the ascent of Kuwee and left Angkuni behind.

  Kuwee had little depth. Like most Barrens rivers it simply ran at will over the boulder-laden land, for it had not yet dug itself a bed. We scrambled up and our progress was a constant struggle with shallow but active rapids. During the first day’s travel we were plagued by a sense of frustration, for only many days of tortuous progress could tell us with certainty whether or not we were following a blind alley.

  Towards evening of that day, we rounded an abrupt angle of the river and came upon two stone men by the shore. I cannot express the magnificent sensation of relief they gave us, but for the first time I felt the true power of the Inukshuk. I knew then why they had been built everywhere across the land, and I understood the mute role they played. The oppressive sense of our unimportance, and the nagging fears that we were being sucked into a dead vacuum somewhere beyond the scope of life, were banished instantly when the stone men appeared. We smiled at them, and at each other, and we waved our paddles cheerfully at those silent beings who have vital force without the gift of life.

  By noon of the second day we had progressed well into the land to the west, and Kuwee was growing stronger and more clearly defined as we moved up it. This was strange, for rivers usually grow weaker as you near their headwaters. At last the little river opened into a lake and we went ashore to climb a ridge and see if we could discover the inlet to that lake.

  From the ridge we saw no opening along the tenebrous line of undulating shore, but far off to the west was the minute projection of another Inukshuk upon a hill. With perfect confidence we headed into the open water and set a course for the distant stone man.

  We were only a mile from shore when, with no more warning than an artillery shell is likely to give, the still lake erupted into a cataclysmic sea. The wind did not “rise,” it simply was in being! The soporific and somehow frightening calm of the preceding days was not broken, it vanished instantly. No clouds showed anywhere upon the unchanged sky and yet from somewhere, as if generated on the exact spot where the canoe was moving, a wind that was almost a hurricane was born.

  The lake was shallow, and in a minute it had been whipped to white-tipped breakers which lifted us, then flung us down again with calculated savagery. Ohoto worked frantically with the teapot to bail out the solid sheets of spray, while Andy and I drove the furiously active craft toward the nearest shore.

  There was an unconcealed and bitter animosity about that wind which brought a greater terror than the elements had ever instilled in me before. It lay, I think, in the unexpected nature of the attack, whose unprovoked violence had come upon us so quickly that the mind hardly grasped its reality until the storm was threatening to sink us. We survived it, but I never again walked the Barrens, or paddled a canoe upon the lakes and rivers of the plains, without a sort of Ancient Mariner complex, peering back over my shoulder as it were, so that the unseeable and vindictive presence would not again take me so nakedly unaware.

  We made the shelter of a reef, and here the canoe pounded viciously until the wind vanished as inexplicably as it had risen. Then we scuttled feverishly along the shore, hugging the coastal rocks as a rat hugs the walls of a broad room.

  For five more days we traveled up the river, and where the falls were too angry we portaged our gear over the flat, sodden world around us. The hills and ridges were all gone, sunken into a morass so that only their black spines remained in sight, like buffaloes wallowing in a swamp. Water seemed to have risen up through the earth’s crust to drown the country in one great, quaking bog. It was no place for men, but it was built to order for the flies, and these rose to a crescendo of hungry activity so that they crawled over our bodies like a living cloth.

  At every rapid Ohoto showed his skill as a fisherman, using a short length of twine and a hook baited with a bit of shiny tin. Standing on a rock near the foot of the rapid, he whirled the hook about his head, let it fly into the deepest pool, and with clockwork regularity hauled out the great red-fleshed lake trout. At night we sat about the fire—when we could find fuel enough to build one—and ate the boiled heads of the trout. Nor were we too delicate to eat the firm red meat raw when no fire could be had. Our slim rations were almost gone, so we gorged on fish. But though we consumed tremendous quantities, we seemed to extract no stamina, no strength and staying power from this food. It was a firsthand demonstration of the inability of fish to meet the dietary needs of men in the arctic plains.

  On the fifth day we came upon a low-lying point that almost bisected a little lake on the river’s course. There we found a tent ring, the remnants of another camp of bygone men. But this ring was very small and not quite round. Even more baffling were the nearby ribs of a boat, which were much more like those of our canoe than like a kayak’s.

  Ohoto muttered, “Indians camped here. See—here is their umiak, their canoe!”

  It was almost incredible that forest Indians could have found their way through the hostile lands of the Innuit to such a distance. But Ohoto was right, for this was indeed an ancient camp of the Idthen Eldeli, built in the days when those Eaters of the Deer used to follow the great herds northward even as we were following them now. For us it was a heartening find. That camp, and the Inukshuk we had seen earlier, made it certain that Kuwee must lead to some major river course, or lake, where the deer might be expected. Yet it was also a mystifying find and my imagination dwelt on those distant days when the birch canoes of the Idthen Eldeli penetrated the Barrenlands and when butchery and massacres were known on many lakes and rivers.

  Kuwee left the little lake and pointed to the north. Another day, and we heard the heavy, sullen roar of a big rapids, and went ashore to have a look before proceeding into the maelstrom.

  Once on the high bank of the shore, and raised from the downward-sloping surface of the river, we saw stretching to the horizon on the west the clear, livid blue of open water under a blazing sun. Here was a vast unnamed and unmapped lake that no white man had ever looked upon before. This lake, whose western shores lay below the line of the horizon, was an irresistible magnet to our restless curiosity. Where it should have shown upon the maps there was nothing but blank white paper. The desire to sketch in a crude black outline on that virginal expanse of map was, I suppose, the essence of the desire which makes most men yearn to push beyond known limits, whether in the flesh or in the mind.

  But Ohoto did not share our desire. For a long time he stared moodily out over the gleaming waters. When at last he spoke, it was to show the first signs of fear we had seen in him.

  “It would be well if we turned back,” he said. “Better to camp among the dead we know, than venture into this place where men have never been!”

  We questioned him and discovered that he had no knowledge of this place where we now stood. Ohoto’s fears were natural enough, yet he stifled them when we insisted on pushing forward, and when we reminded him of the friendly presence of the Inukshuk. But before we climbed into the canoe, after portaging around the rapids to the lake’s ragged shore, Ohoto stopped to gather a handful of small pebbles. Once in the canoe, he tied these little stones together with a length of rawhide line. We paddled out over the translucent waters and when the bottom of the lake had dropped and disappeared from sight, Ohoto carefully slid his string of pebbles overboard and let them go, soundlessly, into the deep waters.

  It was his gesture of appeasement toward the unknown beings who might lie hidden under the glaring surface of the lake.

  16. Ghosts, Devils and Spirits

  It is time now to speak about the ghosts and devils who share the Barrens with the People and the deer, for in the days which follo
wed the discovery of the nameless lake, these things loomed large in our experiences.

  In the world of the Ihalmiut, the Law governs both man’s social and his spiritual life, and applies with equal force not only to the absolute realities but to the abstractions of the supernatural. There is but one Law for man and for the spectral entities whose name is legion. These “other beings” are so numerous and have such varied forms that the Ihalmiut do not know them all by name or even by description, and they can hardly gauge the full potentialities of those they know. It follows therefore that a man must be exceedingly careful to observe the most trivial instructions of the Law which can alone protect him from both the known and the unknowable.

  It was through the fine mesh of the Law of Life that I saw and came to have a limited understanding of the hierarchy of the Barrens’ demiworld. Kakumee was my principal instructor and he knew whereof he spoke, for he was closely in league with many ghosts. He showed no reluctance in discussing these things with me, nor did I encounter that reluctance among any of the People, perhaps because they have not yet heard that the beliefs are abhorrent to white men, and must be hidden from us.

  At the peak of the hierarchy of spiritual beings stand those elemental forces of nature which have no concrete form. At their head is Kaila, the god of weather and of the sky. Kaila is the creator and thus the paramount godhead of the People. He is aloof, as the mightiest deity should be, and man is no more than dust under his feet. He demands neither abasement nor worship from those he has created. But Kaila is a just god, for he is all things brought about by the powers of nature, and nature, who is completely impartial, cannot be unjust.